Invitations
Let guests know that this party is about pottery with invitations featuring such designs as clay pots, paints and paintbrushes, clumps of clay, Play-doh pots, and children’s clay sculptures.

Decorations
Since your pottery party will be held at a ceramics studio, you can either decorate the party room at the studio, or decorate a room at home if the festivities are to continue there afterward. If the ceramics studio permits, use streamers, balloons, and a Happy Birthday sign to make the area more festive. Back at home, decorate your party room in the same way, but place a special display table along one wall for exhibiting any art creations that guests made at the studio and were ready to take home that day. For appropriate table centerpieces, use handmade ceramic pots filled with fresh flowers.

Activities
A pottery party will keep guests busy while working at the pottery wheel or with ceramic molds. To keep the party going after the ceramics studio, have guests continue to create more works of art using Play-doh or clay. Be sure all surfaces upon which they are working are well-covered with plastic tablecloths.

Snacks
Your guests will have their hands too full and dirty to eat while making their pottery pieces, but you can bet they will have worked up a good appetite after so much creativity! Serve chicken pot pie, potato salad, potato chips, and a big pot of iced tea.

Cake
To make a cake look like a hand-thrown pot, use four or five cake layers of varying sizes, with the smallest layer at top tapering down to the largest layer at the bottom. Cover the entire cake with frosting, then serve it upon a round, terra-cotta platter that looks like a potter’s wheel.

Goody Bags
Help your child to decorate plain gift boxes with stickers, rubber stamps, markers or crayons, so that partygoers will have something special in which to take home their artistic creations.

Thank-you’s
Match your thank-you notes to your invitation, or choose a complementary design. Teach your child good manners by having him or her sign their own name to each note. Draw a tiny vase with flowers next to the child’s name to complete the pottery theme. Don’t forget to mention what the gift was that you’re thanking the person for -- and how much your child enjoyed it!